The Road to Hell
by Samalander
Summary: Aziraphale's bookshop is given a hint. Crowley's apartment is surpsied. Mr. Spelter finds some beetles. Eggs are burned. Sweet, but not slashy.


"Somebody could have done something."

Crowley knelt and picked up a mangled bit of cardboard that had only recently been a book. Someone had very meticulously torn out the pages, leaving only a flimsy, broken shell.

"Somebody could have done something."

Display cases had been smashed, and the jagged edges of glass used to slice apart the leather bindings of the books inside.

"Somebody could have _done_ something."

They had pulled up to the bookshop after a leisurely dinner to find the front door hanging open. Aziraphale had gone very quiet. He looked at the door a moment, then very carefully opened the door and stepped out of the car.

The inside of the shop was thick with disturbed dust and the smell of burning paper; someone had lit a fire in a wastebasket near one corner. Crowley put it out with a gesture. Torn pages crackled under his feet.

All the while Aziraphale stood in the doorway, staring.

Books lay in piles on the floor, covers bent, spines broken. Many of them had been stripped bare of their pages. Some had been burnt in the wastebasket. One almost had to admire it, really; it must have taken a lot of patience.

"Anyone could have seen them come in. They must have been in here for hours."  
Crowley glanced over at Aziraphale, who was still looking stricken. "There would have been a lot of noise," the angel went on. "Someone could have telephoned the police. Done _something."_

_But why do anything when it's so much easier to look the other way?_ Crowley thought, moving over to the cash box. It was full; this hadn't been about money. _There's no reason for them to stick their neck out for some faggy little bookseller._

"Come on," Crowley said wearily, putting a hand on the angel's shoulder. "Let's go."

If apartments were capable of being surprised, Crowley's must have been stunned speechless. He rarely set foot in the place, much less brought home company. Aziraphale sat on the leather sofa and looked very out of place while the potted plants looked on in interest and Crowley knocked about in the kitchen trying to remember how to make tea.

Darjeeling, yes, that's all Aziraphale needed. Something to take his mind off of the utter mess those vindictive little bastards had made of his shop. Crowley wondered if he'd ever bothered to keep biscuits in the house and found shortbread in a previously empty cupboard. 

"Utter Mess" was a very limp way to describe what had been done to that place. It had been violated. Desecrated. Torn open with bare hands, all the insides laid bare, ripped out and exposed.

Being a demon meant having a very vivid imagination.

"Here." Crowley pushed the mug of tea into Aziraphale's unresisting hands. He sat down on the sofa next to the angel and watched him stare desolately into the rippling depths of his mug.

Several long, uncomfortably silent minutes passed as Crowley stared very hard at Aziraphale's tartan scarf and tried to think of something to say, or whether he should say anything at all. He'd never been very good at this sort of thing.

"Well," he said finally, trying to sound cheerful, "I expect you'll have a great time tracking down more copies of those books, eh? The thrill of the hunt, right?"

There was no response.

"Or," Crowley went on desperately, "Or, you could go out and find the little buggers who did it, yeah? Give the old smiting muscles a good workout?"  
Steam swirled silently into the air.

"You could buy some bonbons and have yourself a good cry."

More silence. Crowley gave up and leaned his arms on his knees, staring moodily at the blank television.

Finally, Aziraphale took a breath. "You were right, you know," he said quietly.  
Crowley looked up. "Mm?"

"The things humans think up on their own are always so much more terrible than anything demons could do." He lifted his mug and drank.

"Well I—they—er." Crowley sighed. "Yes." He stared at the television some more.  
Aziraphale drained his mug and set it carefully on the coffee table, then stood up. "What is that thing that humans do where they lay down and don't think about things for a little while?"

Crowley blinked. "Sleep?"

"Yes. I'm going to do that."

And so Crowley's bed was very startled to find an angel climbing into it.

Several doors away from Aziraphale's ravaged bookshop, a man named Spelter was just climbing into bed. He'd had a productive day; he'd taken care of a nagging thorn in his side, and he was expecting many more productive days in the near future. He scratched his arm and smiled to himself, laying his head on the pillow. Yes, it had been a little unpleasant, but some things had to be done to make room for the wave of the future. A spot on his leg tingled slightly. And it wasn't as if they hadn't made every effort to do things the easy way. Some people just couldn't take a hint. His fingers twitched. Some people had to be _given_ a hint, wrapped in bright yellow paper with the word HINT scrawled across it.

Spelter scratched harder at his arm, and then looked at the raw, scraped skin. He was beginning to feel itchy all over, as if he were wearing woolen long johns. He must be allergic to something. He scratched a little more, and something small and black rolled under his fingers.

It was a beetle, no bigger than a freckle, tiny feelers waving. There were several more crawling up Spelter's arm. With a shudder he leapt out of bed and slapped them off of him, but there were still more, crawling on his arms, his legs, in his hair. He raked his fingernails across his skin, panic rising, and staggered into the shower. Tearing off his nightclothes, Spelter turned the water on as hot as he could stand and stood under its torrent, scrubbing off the little black beetles that seemed to be coming from nowhere. And his skin wouldn't stop itching. Where he had been scratching before there was now a hard little lump. There were more lumps along his thighs, and one on the side of his neck. 

_A doctor,_ Spelter thought, still beating off the beetles. _I've got to get to a doctor._ He looked down at the lump on his arm again just in time to see it burst, hundreds of beetles pouring out of it and over his skin, thousands of beetles, bursting out of every pore on his body. And he screamed, and screamed, and screamed.

Down on the street, a handsome black Bentley pulled away.

When Aziraphale woke, the apartment smelled like Joan of Arc's going-away party. He stumbled into the kitchen, feeling groggy, to find Crowley glaring at eggs. "It's harder than it looks," the demon said in response to Aziraphale's amused look.

"Shouldn't they have gotten a fair trial first?" Aziraphale asked, using a spatula to scrape the earthly remains of breakfast off of the frying pan.  
"If you're going to be like that, you can make your _own_ blessed breakfast," Crowley snarled. "I was only trying to—" he stopped himself just in time.

Aziraphale smiled. "The road to Hell, and all that. I'm not in the mood to eat." He sighed. "I suppose I should… Go back."

"What, now?"

"I can't just leave it like that." He went back into Crowley's bedroom and emerged with his coat and scarf. "Coming?"

A few days later, Crowley ignored the 'CLOSED' sign and the lock on the door and let himself into Aziraphale's shop. Most of the wreckage had been cleared away, and what books that could be salvaged were huddled on the end of a bare shelf. The angel was sitting at a table in the back room going over an inventory list; almost all of the book titles had been crossed out with red ink.

"There isn't much left," Aziraphale said as Crowley sat opposite him. "And what is left couldn't pass for mint in a dark room. They were very… thorough."

Crowley tightened his fingers around the parcel he held in his lap, then took a deep breath. "I… brought you something." He set the parcel on the table and shoved it towards the angel before he could change his mind. Aziraphale blinked at it, then carefully unwrapped it and pulled out a book.

"It was the only thing I had around," Crowley said, staring at the table.  
"User's Manual for the Atrati 2400 Desktop Computer," Aziraphale read, his expression blank. He opened the book to a random page. "'Please do not immersing in water, for you may be the cause of a great occurrence!'"

The demon cleared his throat uncomfortably. "It's not exactly Voltaire, but at least it's something."

"It certainly is that," Aziraphale said carefully, leafing through the pages.  
They listened to the books collecting dust for a while.

"Listen," Crowley said, "If you don't want—"

"Thank you," Aziraphale interrupted quietly, "very much."

Crowley nodded. "Er. Yeah. No problem. So do you—" he paused. The angel had a very odd look in his eyes. "Do you want to get out for some lunch?"

"Certainly, my dear."

end.


End file.
